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An anonymous reader writes "Enter decentralized, open source mining with the first scientific proof of work. Riecoin is a decentralized (p2p), open source digital currency. Proof of work is about finding Hardy-Littlewood k-tuples. Ultimately miners are verifying the Riemann hypothesis. Unlike for Primecoin the probability of accepting a false positive goes to zero as the network grows. Primecoin uses Fermat Test which runs the risk of accepting so called Carmichael numbers. Riecoin uses a stronger test to ensure correctness."

See, this is a big problem that many people don't understand: the difference between "worth" (or "value") and price. They are not the same things, and that is what has ruined Bitcoin.

Economically, the intrinsic value of something is approximately: the cost of production + the cost of distribution. Bitcoin was intended to be basically free to distribute. So the intrinsic worth should be approximately the cost of production. (Plus a tiny bit... it's not exact.)

The reason this is called the "value", is because if the price goes much higher than this, more people will start producing them because there's good profit to be had. If the price drops below that point, people will stop producing them because there's no profit to be had. Make sense?

Unfortunately, today's stock market all too often ignores value and goes by price alone. That is how bubbles form: the price of something gets outrageously inflated, completely aside from any value. When actual supply-and-demand rear their heads, and the commodity is suddenly associated with that value again, as it eventually must... everybody who bought at that inflated price lose a lot of money.

This all comes down to one basic point: the current stock market is often irrational, because it has gotten to a point where it completely ignores actual value of something and goes by price alone. This is irrational and leads to all kinds of problems.

So, keep in mind: if you invest in a cryptocurrency (or anything else, for that matter) at a price that is far above it's "intrinsic value", be careful. You might make money if you know what you're doing, but you could also become the victim of the bubble and lose your shorts at any time.

Most of the proof-of-work systems out there are really demanding that you waste some amount of money, time, or both, to prevent people from just generating arbitrarily high numbers of coins (as opposed to the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy use of leaves as coins.) Bitcoin number-crunching is purely wasteful potlatching. Dogecoin is such wow, so calculation!

At least this one is doing a kind of work that's potentially valuable to the world, assuming the system collects all of it in a way that can be used to contribute to mathematical knowledge. (Yeah, yeah, this is/., and I'm commenting on the article without reading it:-) There may be other kinds of calculations that are both useful and verifiable out there. Unfortunately, protein folding and most other non-mathematical real-world applications probably aren't easily verifiable except by having N people redo the same calculation, which is a problem for currencies that need to prevent double-spending. (I ran Folding@Home for a while, as well as the GIMPS Mersenne Prime Search. For SETI@Home, which for some years was a far larger supercomputer than anything on the Top-500 list, sure, you can contend that there really aren't aliens in the chunk of sky your system was testing, but that's not the kind of verification we're looking for...)

The intrinsic value of money is less than the value of the paper it is printed on. The real value of money is entirely due to the number of people who accept it as payment. Most countries' currencies are accepted as payment by more people than bitcoin is, which is why the value of bitcoin is still quite uncertain. There may be cases where the population of a country do not accept the official currency of that country as payment. But when that happens, they tend to choose using anot

If an economy goes bad enough (e.g.hyperinflation) black markets spring up, and only at the end are the cognac/cigarettes exchanged for the currency to pay the taxes. So being accepted for tax isn't a sufficient condition for a currency to have value.

In a normal economy, currency has value because it's accepted everywhere for local transactions because of certain safeguards*. That is, if I hand over money to a store to buy something, and the storekeeper never hands me my item, I can go and ask Plod for

There is honest money to be made in the stock market. Not everything is overvalued all of the time. For most stocks, on most days, the price is a more-or-less reasonable approximation of the present value of the share, from which you can expect a reasonable return of a few percent per year, either from dividends or increased capital. That's a piece of the earnings of actual companies making actual products.

These are not the stocks that attract press, more or less by definition. Figuring out which ones are t

That idea of value was nice, in the 19th century. While one can come up with a concept of value, that value is not the same for all actors: Value is not really cost of production, but utility. And we also have to consider marginal value: Water is extremely valuable, but we have so much, the marginal value of producing another glass of drinking water is pretty low.

Many things will never be sold for how much they cost to make, because their actual value, their utility, is far lower than the cost of production. And since values and costs of production change over time, it's not difficult to find items for sale for less than the cost of production.

Then we have stocks and bubbles. The price of a stock doesn't just reflect how much it's worth now, but how much it's expected to be worth in the future. This does cover speculation too: There is a utility in holding something if you expect to be able to resell it for more tomorrow. So I'd not say that what people call bubbles has that much to do with being far from fundamentals, but with information being propagated that shows that the current estimate of future value is very different from the current price. If a pharma company is on trials to cure a major kind of cancer, its stock will go up. If the trials are unsuccessful, it might go all the way to zero. But that doesn't mean that there was a bubble. This is especially true with stocks, where, if you really think a price is way too high, a hedge fund can make money shorting it.

So, when calling something a bubble, we have to have some very strong reasons to do so. You could claim that the Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn't hold, even at the weakest of levels, at which point you are very, very far from mainstream economics. You can instead claim that the problem is that the market is being manipulated, and that might be the case with Bitcoin, for instance. Maybe a company is committing major fraud, and most people don't know about it, but you do have insider knowledge. That'd not be much of a bubble, just plain decepcion. You could also claim that there are major amounts of risk baked into the price, so you can expect volatility. Many would argue that the financial crisis, for instance, was really all about the Fed just not making any sense, and not reacting to a sudden increase to the demand of money.

So when it comes to bitcoin, how do you explain the bubble? My favorite is a combination of price manipulation from actors that control way too much bitcoin for a market to be all that efficient, tied to a high amount of variance in possible outcomes. If through something strange, Bitcoin actually happened to become important, then its current price is very low compared to what it should be. If it is not, then the current price is way too high. So what we see is a market that is mostly known by people who are just spending a few dollars hoping to make millions, so for them, it's a lottery ticket. Buying a lottery ticket, hand having it lose, doesn't mean that there was an asset bubble with the tickets, does it?:)

"That idea of value was nice, in the 19th century. While one can come up with a concept of value, that value is not the same for all actors: Value is not really cost of production, but utility. And we also have to consider marginal value: Water is extremely valuable, but we have so much, the marginal value of producing another glass of drinking water is pretty low."

No, and no.

As I wrote in another reply: "intrinsic value" has a specific meaning. Different schools of economics might call it by different names, but the concept is present in any free-market economics. Without it, supply and demand would not give any kind of rational price signals. Intrinsic value is a clearly defined mathematical concept in economics. What you mean by "value" here is the subjective value of something to a consumer, which is a completely different thing.

"Water is extremely valuable, but we have so much, the marginal value of producing another glass of drinking water is pretty low."

Again you are confusing subjective "value", or importance, to economic value. It doesn't work that way. This is the point I was originally making: in economic terms, cost, price and value are all very different things. But aside from that, marginal subjective consumer "value" is yet another thing, unrelated to the kind of "value" I was referring to.

Water is cheap precisely because of the effects I already described: the cost of production is extremely low, and there is ample supply. If it

Very good points you bring up. However I'm not sure it applies to currency. For example, the "intrinsic value" of a 100 dollar bill is far below $100, yet it still retains that value.

With a currency, worth gets computed as a factor of total amount of assets and production over supply of the currency. This, of course, assumes that everyone participating accepts that currency as valid. This is what is driving the price of bitcoin at the moment: pure speculation of wide acceptance of it as a valid currency.

i could make turd sculptures at home too - that doesn't mean they have any intrinsic value. certainly no more or less than the bitcoins i could make at home.

bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies are the ultimate in fiat currencies - there is no intrinsic value or worth in the fact that some calculation has been performed. proof of worthless work is just as worthless as the work.

they only have any "value" because it's a ponzi scheme of people pretending they have value.

Bitcoins, unlike dollars, are a commodity. You can literally create them at home. That is why they have an intrinsic value, and why economically speaking they are different from dollars.

True but misleading. What you actually can do at home is confirm Bitcoin transactions, which reinforces transaction history against double-spends. For this service, you receive transaction fees. As an added incentive, you currently also receive newly minted Bitcoins. However, the latter is merely a side effect to help boots

"What you actually can do at home is confirm Bitcoin transactions, which reinforces transaction history against double-spends."

NO. You can actually "create" Bitcoins at home by "mining" them. (If you want to get technical, you are actually discovering them, but it's called mining.) This is NOT the same as confirming transactions. I know... I've mined some.

"The whole idea of Bitcoins having "intrinsic value" is about the same as claiming miles or newton seconds have an intrinsic value. They are simply arbitrary units of measurement in a distributed ledger system. Bitcoins have no identity, they're simply a unit of magnitude."

NO again. That's not what "intrinsic value" means. It isn't some "value" that you attach to something. It is a specific quantity that can be precisely calculated. It has nothing to do with a Bitcoin's "value" to you, and it has nothing to do with market price. Economically speakin

Economically, the intrinsic value of something is approximately: the cost of production + the cost of distribution.

That's usually just called "cost". And "value" is used for how much I'd be willing to pay for it. And for currency, that's not "intrinsic value" but the value of the goods and services I can get with it.

Sorry Misses,While your first post made sense, this doeas not. In fact it contradicts your first post.

The concept of "intrinsic value" is central to the whole idea of "supply and demand".

Certainly not. What has the "intrinsic value" of a fresh baked bread (it can be eaten) to do with its value? Or what has the "intrinsic value" of a piece of coal (which can be burned, and thats it) to do with supply and demand on coal and hence its price?

"Using the term: 'read something about macro economics, and then come back to me' is a form of the anti pattern Intellectual Violence. Read up about it, then come back to me;)"

Baldly stating

"Nothing has intrinsic value."

as GP did, to an explanation of intrinsic value is also "intellectual violence". Why should I not reply in kind? I reserve the right to defend myself from verbal violence, using verbal violence myself if necessary.

Speaking of which, you demonstrate the same kind of behavior by making argumentative but unsubstantive comments like:

"Certainly not. What has the "intrinsic value" of a fresh baked bread (it can be eaten) to do with its value? Or what has the 'intrinsic value' of a piece of coal (which can be burned, and thats it) to do with supply and demand on coal and hence its price?"

Amusing. You ask me to explain something I've already explained. So please tell me which this is: trolling, or just a failure to understand? If it is failure to und

1. The actual value of a company or an asset based on an underlying perception of its true value including all aspects of the business, in terms of both tangible and intangible factors. This value may or may not be the same as the current market value.

This says something very different from cost of production + cost of distribution, and the fact that it includes "intangible factors" and "perception" belies the notion that it can be precisely calculated.

Neither of the definitions you give are the "intrinsic value" I was referring to.

The first one is not in the context of macroeconomics. It is a business definition. The second definition is the concept of a "value" that some good "intrinsically" has, which again is not the same thing. The "intrinsic value" to which I referred is neither of those things. It is an abstract economic concept. Technically, it is a cost.

I have explained this many times already, but I'll do it again: the term "intrinsic valu

"That said, I agree that Jane Q. Public's distinction between Worth/Value and Price is a bit broken, or at least, one-sided"

That's because that is NOT the distinction I was making. "Intrinsic value" is not a "worth". Nor is it a "value" in the usual sense of the term. In actual calculation, it is a COST.

I didn't say anything was "worth" its intrinsic value. What I said was: in a rational free market, prices tend to gravitate toward the intrinsic value. But it is not the "value" or "worth" of anything. It is not the subjective "value" you attach to something, nor is it the market price. It has nothing at all to with the former

Nothing has intrinsic value. Individuals decide how much value things have for themselves.

The concept of "intrinsic value" requires the existence of an "Uber-Evaluator" who dictates that intrinsic value. Because that value can and will be radically different to different people at different times. But no such evaluator exists, so I must agree with the AC comment that nothing has intrinsic value. Items can have radically different values to in

What we're really going to need, and soon, is a program to know what all these *coin currencies are, and maybe some exchanges to change your Xcoins to Ycoins to dollars. Maybe even a consumer report on the issue: "We recommend avoiding FraudCoin as a poor value."

What we're really going to need, and soon, is a program to know what all these *coin currencies are, and maybe some exchanges to change your Xcoins to Ycoins to dollars. Maybe even a consumer report on the issue: "We recommend avoiding FraudCoin as a poor value."

I do wonder if we're going to see a massive collapse of all those cryptocurrencies. Currently it seems like every time a currency stops being profitable to mine, another one springs up. This sort of thing won't last.

Might I guess that you are involved in "litecoin" somehow (i.e., mine some, have bought some, whatever)?

I've never heard of it. Ever. Admittedly I'm not the sole arbiter of when something becomes brand-recognised, but I do read a lot of tech sites and I've never heard the name come up before (or at least, not in any way that has caused me to remember it). Can't see why you'd think that it has broken out of the "other" category. Frankly, Dogecoin is better known- and that's a take-the-piss.

Litecoin is well-established enough to actually have an exchange rate and at least one real business taking payment in it, but it's still no more than a shadow of bitcoin. It's designed a little differently - I don't know the details, but the configuration is set to allow for faster transactions, and there are more coins so each one will be worth less and so invoke less subdivision complexity. The idea is to be more practical than bitcoin for very small, time-limited payments. If you want to pay the equivil

"Fiat currency only works as well are all those making use of it agree on its value."

There. FTFY.
Bitcoin is not a fiat currency. It is a commodity. It has an "intrinsic" value, which is not subject to opinion.

Not sure what bitcoin has to do with GP's post, but since you brought it up...

While a commodity can be used as currency, commodities always have uses outside of their value as currencies. Bitcoin does not share this property. A bitcoin is nothing more than a numerical balance in a distributed triple entry ledger.

But if you can tell me what you can do with a bitcoin other than spend it (transfer the ledger balance from one account to another), I'd be willing to change my mind.:-)

"While a commodity can be used as currency, commodities always have uses outside of their value as currencies."

Always? Well, it's true that gold, when it was both a commodity and a currency, had other uses. But until very recently, from a historical perspective, the only other use it had was art. And even then, it was only valued as art because it was effectively money; other less-expensive substances also had as much shine.

I'm not sure why you think "pretty thing/art medium" counts as being useful. I could say that bitcoin is useful to because some people derive pleasure from knowing the answers to useless math problems.

You can make things that are the same color as gold. Why is it important that things actually be made of gold? It is only because it is a status symbol because of it's rarity. Gold's most useful feature is it's rarity. Bitcoins are rare too. Things don't need to be physical to be rare. Maybe everyone wi

If it is true that something like jewelry is "useful" because there is an industry built on it, then bitcoin is the same kind of "useful" by the same logic.

I am not arguing that gold and jewelry don't serve as status symbols. I am saying that I don't consider status symbols to be useful in the same sense as things like food, water, and shelter (i.e. in the sense that we are no worse off without status symbols).

Also, I think gold's usefulness in jewelry comes mostly from the fact that it is valuable as a cu

"Gold was valued as a pretty thing/art medium before it came into use as a currency."

You make a good point.

"Some folks really really want bitcoins to be a commodites because of their ideological disposition, but in reality they're nothing more than bits 'n bytes representing ledger balances."

No, they're commodities all right. The "bits 'n bytes" thing makes no difference. By that logic, you could say that electronic documents are not "commodities", even though they outSOLD paper books last year. But of course they (and Bitcoin) ARE commodities in every economic sense of the term: they are tangible goods (in a rough sense... I can put them on my cell phone and take them with me), they have costs of production, they can be sold on the free market, they can be traded. There i

Well...like I said before, if you can tell me what can be done with a bitcoin other than transfer it to a different wallet/account, I'd be open to the idea that bitcoins are commodities. But balances in a ledger simply don't qualify as commodities, and that's all bitcoins are - ledger balances. So perhaps we'll have to agree to disagree.

(* facepalm *)Ofc, Bitcoin is a fiat currency.It has no intrinsic value, you can not eat/burn it, use it as a brick to build a house from or as an ingredient to an electronic device or any other real world thing you can take into your hands.Perhaps you should read up about the term intrinsic.Heck, without a computer to transfer it for goods or 'real' money it is completely worthless.Real money as in a piece of a one dollar bill, I at least can trade hand to hand in Morocco for a can of green tee, regardless

"It has no intrinsic value, you can not eat/burn it, use it as a brick to build a house from or as an ingredient to an electronic device or any other real world thing you can take into your hands.
Perhaps you should read up about the term intrinsic."

And perhaps you should read up on economics, or at least just look up the phrase "intrinsic value" in an economic context.

I'm not saying that out of "intellectual violence", I'm making a genuine suggestion for improving your knowledge of the subject.

And the reason I'm doing so is because you are still getting it wrong. Your subjective ideas of "value" have NOTHING to do with the economic concept of "intrinsic value". The former is ambiguous; people have different subjective ideas of value. The latter

I know what the definitions are. And I admit that the name "intrinsic value" is unfortunate, because what it describes is not a "value", per se, and what it describes is not "intrinsic" to the product either, but depends on outside factors.

But I did not make the name up; it's right here in my economics book. I'm just using it.

That is the cause of much confusion here. I've spent more time explaining that "intrinsic value" is not intrinsic and not a value, for a good part of the past 2 days.

A 1 dollar bill has not really, except you consider it useful to sniff up a line of cocaine.

Work involved to make something, as your link implies, does not give the artifact resulting any 'intrinsic value'... it might still have no value at all regardless how much raw material or work you have put into it.

What's intrinsic about the value of any given service/comodity/product?
it depends on the value of somthing else which depends on the value on something else... etc, it will end up depending on someone's time somewhere costing.
what is the intrinsic value of time? yours? mine? the time of the guy sitting in the corner? the miner's? the cop's?

From wikipedia:
Fiat money has been defined variously as:
1. any money declared by a government to be legal tender.
2. state-issued money which is neither convertible by law to any other thing, nor fixed in value in terms of any objective standard.
3. money without intrinsic value that is used as money because of government decree.
Notice how the word government or state is mentioned in each definition.

And? It is a wikipedia article!Fiat money is older than wikipedia, perhaps looking into s real dictionary/enciclopaedia helps. But let me check the german version, perhaps it agrees with you:)Well, the german version agrees with me http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org] Every money that is not backed or has an intrinsic value (like using rice as money) is fiat money, has absolutely nothing to do with a government or not.Or how exactly would you call money that I myself invent?

The "fiat" part of fiat money is referring to the fact that "someone" is simply proclaiming/decreeing the money to have value rather than it having instrinsic value or being able to be exchanged for something of intrinsic value. This "someone" needs to have the legal authority to create the fiat money in the first place (i.e. a government).

Bitcoin is not a fiat currency because it doesn't have intrinsic value. It is not a fiat currency because no authority has proclaimed "let it be done" (i.e. the "fiat"

Everybody has the authority to create fiat money, there is no special government or something else needed.But as I said before, perhaps the definition or interpretation about what fiat means varies from culture to culture.

For me, and all people I know, Bitcoin is a classic example for a fiat currency...

The historical connection might be, but that is not the reason for the term, fiat simply means: out of nothing, just like Bitcoins are out of nothing.

Yes everybody has the authority to create whatever kind of new money they want. What they don't have the authority to do is to make it valuable to people (i.e. by forcing people to accept it as payment). The creation of the money is not by fiat. The value of money through forced use is by fiat.

I agree that it doesn't ultimately matter what concept we associate with fiat. That's just semantics. The point I am trying to make is that with bitcoin the value is not by fiat. Nobody is forced to accept bitco

Then you'd better tell all the economists, because they aren't aware of this.

Without a concept of intrinsic value (even though some schools of economics might call it something else), there can be no such thing as supply and demand. As I say: the name may be different, but without the basic concept of intrinsic value not one of their hallowed economic curves will work.

Can we please have a cryptocurrency that doesn't very rapidly involve burning vast amounts of electricity to perform calculations that have no other purpose than creating the currency? This just seems like a grotesque waste of resources. If there's no way to make a viable cryptocurrency other than performing long calculations, at least find a way to make the calculations have actual utility - incorporate foldingathome into it or something so at least you're curing cancer while generating the currency.

The problem with each additional coin is that they aren't bitcoin and thus don't have a userbase, on top of that they never will have if they are tied to a specific project. What is really needed is that the proof of work concept be centralised for the scientific community. That way if you mine bitcoin / curecoin / dogycoin / whatever, you're part of a distributed resource for real projects.

Gridcoin. You can mine normally with cgminer, but you also earn coins from your BOINC work. They're currently implementing a feature called scrypt-sleep which will rest your transaction mining so that BOINC apps which utilize GPU will earn work credits that way.The dev has been working hard on it, and releases updates every day or two for the mining client.

Very difficult, really. There are very few problems which meet the technical requirements to use in the mining process, and mining is actually an essential part of how the technology works at a technological level. Just remember that conventional finance is hardly energy-efficient either.

I'd prefer such a currency if it, as a side effect, solved useful problems, vs. one that does busywork and has no useful side effects. Even if it's only marginally useful.

You make an interesting point vs. the classical financial system, and I'd like to hear more on that. I can't immediately see why, if we all flipped to bitcoin tomorrow, we wouldn't need essentially all the same infrastructure, plus a little bit of new waste. I feel like you think I'm missing something important, and would like to know w

I feel like you think I'm missing something important, and would like to know what it is.

You are, its that Bitcoin is far weirder than you seem to understand. Consider for a second what a Bitcoin is...theoretically it is an international currency (that hopefully will be stable one day) that is inherently deflationary. What does that mean to normal people? That a Bitcoin wallet is a swiss bank account they can carry around and control themselves. This is because the new supply of Bitcoin is constantly decreasing so the price of Bitcoins to other currencies should rise over time. This emulat

One quick add to that link, they estimate that miners are spending 90% of their mining income on power for their rigs. This ignores ASIC miners where only about 5-10% of the value of the Bitcoins mined gets spent on power (on average, I'm using CA power in the USA so my power rates are probably higher than miners in other parts of the world). Also, ASIC miners are probably 60% miners by hashrate, at least currently and will be more like 95% in the next year. So basically take all the values in that artic

Why does every new cryptocurrency assume that you're already familiar with how they work? I don't want to go start mining bitcoins in order to figure out how the software works. Whatever happened to quick start guides?

I'm sure I could figure this stuff out, but I'm already in the middle of three other research projects

I set up a mining thing to learn how it works too: My objective is to mine the minimum amount of bitcoin needed to achieve a payout on the mining pool. I've had a GPU running for a month now and it's more than half way there. It'll run up a power bill a bit higher than the value of the coin, of course, but I'm not doing it for the profit. Plus I spent a chunk of money on the GPU itsself, on the idea that one day I will think up a use for it.

The argument that government backed currencies are so faulty is, well, faulty.

Do certain countries have piss poor systems set up that can make their money worthless, overnight? Yup, that's why folks don't invest in them.

The dollar, the euro, etc. may fluctuate, but there are as reasonable safe guards against them going flat as is currently possible that are what make the world go 'round.

Comparing major real-world currencies to "crypto" currency is like comparing a child's pretend store to Wal-mart. Sure, if you convince enough kids that the pretend stuff in your pretend store is worth enough, you can dupe them into giving you their money. You might even make a few bucks before people catch on, and if you have a large enough supply of dumb kids in your neighborhood that fall for it and believe a baggie of dirt you sell them is magic dirt that will someday turn into gold or candy.

But it ends when the real world gets involved - because the real world doesn't buy into your pretend.

Repeatedly solving equations on a computer does not actually do anything valuable. It simply controls the output. But if what is behind the output of nothing is still nothing, it's simply an age old money scam where the new folks pay to get in by "investing" so the early adopters make money, but eventually the pyramid falls when everyone realizes that it's all based on...nothing.

BitCoin "investors" try so hard to make it all "real" and will quote you academic papers and media curiousity stories and "conferences" of folks who get together to debate all this, but it's just because they want folks to keep believing that some type of alternate currency is just going to sprout up over nothing. Nothing backing it, nothing being produced but virtual money that has no true value except to speculators who depend on additional folks speculating to make their pile of nothing have the perception of being something.

It's all rather insane, but it breeds on basic human hopes for wish fulfillment - the wish to get rich quick. I have no doubt BitCoin has made some folks very rich - but those very rich people became rich because they cash out their hauls into real dollars which can then be used in the real world. Cashing out by selling to folks who come in at the bottom of the pyramid.

I said this elsewhere and was pummeled by a bunch of believers - but you cannot pay for any of the necessities or luxuries of life with BitCoin. They retorted about debit cards and BitCoin ATMs - but missed the point, which is that they had to cash out those BitCoins into real world currency to make it useful. Once folks stop buying into the bottom of the pyramid, hoping to get rich, and the jig is up - they are worthless.

In the future, folks will look back at this as a large experiment gone wrong and marvel at how some of the smartest folks got taken in by this. Scams usually prey on the old and weak, yet you have some otherwise brilliant people who fell for this hook, line, and sinker by the lure of getting rich quick out of nothing.

That's actually not true. I assumed that as well, but there is no actual value in mining other than a time sink. It's not like it actually contributes to anything or a greater whole. That was pretty shocking to me - it's just busy work, I thought that somehow intrinsically it would be using CPU cycles to do something useful.

The problem as I see it is that 'conventional' economics has managed to screw things up so badly that people are desperate for anything that promises an alternative approach avoiding the obvious weaknesses. Even if it clearly introduces new weaknesses.

Wow, that's impressive! Being a bitcoin miner and telling yourself you're trying to live in a sustainable way sounds like an olympic-grade exercise in self-deception. And look at these marvelously contrived arguments in favor of it! If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded "Born to Self-deceive", you would have been on the album cover.